Not Like the Others
by servantofclio
Summary: Long before the Conclave, Branwen of clan Lavellan watched one of her best friends fall for a human. (Lavellan Inquisitor, pre-game backstory)


"He's a shem," Branwen said.

"He's not like other shemlen!" Fioled said, fluffing her hair. She'd gotten her dark locks to curl more than usual, by twisting them around wet rags and tying them off while she slept. It looked monstrously uncomfortable to Branwen, but it wasn't her head, was it, so she was trying not to judge.

Sneaking out to meet up with a shem boy, though, that was something else again. "How is he not like other shemlen?" she asked.

"He's nothing like them at all! He really looks at _me_, not at—you know." She fluffed up her curls again with her fingers, and arranged them to cover most of her ears, peering into the small dingy mirror she held braced against her knees.

"I just don't want you to get hurt," Branwen said with care. She'd grown up with Fioled, and she knew there was no talking her out of it when she get so excited about something, but before it had always been the halla fawns or a new dress or a bit of embroidery she'd newly mastered. Not something like this, something with real consequences.

"He's not like that," Fioled said confidently. She opened the small box of personal things she kept with her bedroll and settled her favorite string of beads around her neck, bright green-blue, to match her eyes, and turned those eyes on Branwen. "How do I look?

She'd have half the boys in the clan falling over themselves to sit next to her or ask her to dance if she ever looked at them like that. Her hair fell dark and and curly around her heart-shaped face, and her eyes shone bright and liquid against her skin, as wood-brown as Branwen's own. She looked so happy and hopeful that Branwen couldn't help but smile back. "You look darling, of course," she said.

"Just cover for me for a little while, all right?" Fioled said. "I'll be back before mid-watch."

"I will," Branwen said, resolving that if Fioled wasn't back by dawn, she'd tell the Keeper everything.

#

It was after mid-watch when Fioled came back, as it turned out, but well before dawn. She crept into the aravel where both young women slept, quiet and stealthy, and Branwen only heard her because she'd hardly been able to sleep all night for worrying. With Fioled settled into her bedroll, Branwen could finally let herself sleep. She waited until mid-morning to try to talk to her friend, when both of them went out to gather herbs and berries, but she didn't have to say a thing because Fioled spoke first.

"He kissed me," she said, her eyes alight and cheeks glowing. "He kissed me and told me I'm beautiful and—oh, Bran, it was _amazing_!"

Branwen wanted to be happy for her, but her pulse felt too loud in her ears. "But what are you going to do?" she asked. "We're only here another four or five nights, maybe."

"We'll be back." Fioled spun in a circle, her arms moving in graceful figures. "We pass through here every season, nearly."

It was true; the market in that town was good, and friendlier to them than a lot of places. "Do you think he'll wait for you?"

"I'll have to ask," Fioled said, "but I think... maybe..." She wound her fingers together. "I need to see him once more before we go, at least. Will you help me?"

Fioled asking for help was how they'd gotten into better than half of the trouble they'd ever had, as children. Branwen had always been the more cautious of the pair, especially when it was anything to do with the shemlen. Fioled was the one who wanted to do things like sneak over to peer at a shemlen farm. Branwen was the more likely to climb a too-large tree and fall out, but when Fioled threw herself into something, she did it headlong and heedless of anything.

But she was Branwen's friend, above all. So she said nothing while Fioled slipped away from the aravels and the fire for her next tryst.

#

A season, indeed passed before the clan's journeys brought them back to the town where Fioled's shem boy lived. Branwen kept her peace while Fi set her hair again, humming to herself all the while. Chances were it would end that night, and she'd let Fioled cry on her shoulder in the morning, and after that maybe Fi would notice the way Davi looked at her, or that young hunter they'd met the last time they crossed paths with another clan.

But no, Fioled was bright-eyed and singing the next morning, and when Branwen caught her alone, Fioled flung her arms around her and whispered, "He said that he _loves_ me, Bran, that he missed me so much, he could hardly think of anything but me the whole time we were apart."

"I'm happy for you," Branwen told her. She meant it, but she was still baffled, because: "But what are you going to do?"

"He's trying for a position in the town's Guard," Fioled said, eyes brilliant with hope. "Then he can save up a bit and get a place outside the barracks and then we could live—"

Branwen's eyes widened. It felt like she'd just fallen into a cold stream. "You'd leave the clan? For a shem?"

"I could sell our goods, it would be good for the clan," Fioled said. "And he's not just any shem, Branwen, can't you see that now?"

Branwen bit her lip. She wasn't sure, not really, but... as the months wore on, she thought she might have been wrong in her first judgment of Fioled's shem boy. Because he kept on. Every time they came back, he was happy to see her, and it made Fioled happy, even though they both had to save what coin they could before they had any hope of staying together.

Branwen met him once, even. She saw them together in the town marketplace, a big strapping blond shem boy with his arm around Fioled's shoulders. She interrupted her own errand to dart over and say hello, hoping to get some sense of what the shem was really like. He ducked his head when Fioled introduced them, and looked Branwen in the eye and smiled and spoke to her polite as you please, so... maybe he was all right after all.

They couldn't keep it a secret forever, of course. When it got out, Fioled listened to the Keeper's lecture with an implacable face and laid her own arguments out with a cool calmness that Branwen wouldn't have guessed she was capable of. She did not move the Keeper, of course, but neither did she stop. She just worked all the harder, making extra goods to sell so that she had more coin to keep against that future day when she'd leave the clan. Some Keepers would have thrown her out at once for her defiance, but theirs said only that she hoped Fi would see sense in time.

It had been a whole year since the thing had started, and on the last summer night before the clan was due to move on for another season, Fioled went to town again. When she came back, the night was dark, though the fire still burned low, and flopped into her bedroll alongside Branwen's, and whispered, "Ohhh Branwen, the things I could tell you."

"What?" Branwen whispered back.

"He's so big, Bran! I mean, he's a shem, of course he's big, but he's big _everywhere_."

Branwen felt her cheeks burn. She'd done no more than exchange stolen kisses with a few boys, she hadn't even thought— "Did it hurt?" she asked before she could think.

Fioled chuckled. "Oh, no. Well, a little, but only for a moment, and then it was just... amazing, so big and thick, I don't think any of our boys could feel like that. And the things he said! He loves me so much, Bran." She sighed, dreamily.

Branwen lay and watched the canopy of trees overhead, a little envy uncurling. There wasn't any of the young men, or young women, either, who thought about her like that, she was sure of it. And here was Fioled with her plans and her boy, enough to leave the clan for. "You're being careful, though, aren't you?" she whispered.

"Of course we are," Fioled said.

#

Careful they might have been then, but when they returned in autumn, Fioled spent nearly all her time in town, and a few weeks later, Branwen caught her on her knees, throwing up into a drift of downed leaves, covered with the first frost. "Fi—" she began, alarmed.

Fioled staggered to her feet, wiping her mouth. "Shh," she said. "It's too early for... it's too early for anything. We'll wait and see."

She'd always been small and trim, though, so it took next to no time before her belly began rounding out, well before her quickening. The sickness passed, and her eyes brightened, and when they returned to town on their winter trip, she gathered up all her things, her small sack of coin, her tools, everything that was hers.

"Do you want me to come with you?" Branwen asked, fidgeting in her own place, thinking of how much emptier the aravel would seem without Fioled there. They'd cross paths again, of course, but it wouldn't be the same: no more whispered conversations at night, no helping each other with the mending, no more gathering together in the woods. They'd been side by side since they were too small to walk, and now Fi was going on without her.

"I'll be fine on my own," Fioled said, smiling. "Come by the market tomorrow if you want."

They embraced, and Branwen watched her quick steps carrying her away from the clan.

She was back within two hours.

She came back with her jaw set and her head held high, and said not a word to anyone, but went into the aravel and let the hatch shut with a bang behind her.

Aravels weren't private space, of course, lots of people slept in each one, but no one dared to follow her, until Branwen, spurred on by the weight of the glances the others kept giving her, sighed and went in.

Fioled had flung herself down amid the bedding. When Branwen sat next to her and brushed her hair away from her face, she turned her face into her pillow and said, muffled, "He said... he said he had his position to think of, and he couldn't possibly marry a— a—"

"Oh, Fi," Branwen said. She'd so wanted to be wrong. She'd hoped she was.

"He never called me that before," Fioled said. She sounded bewildered. "I never even heard him say that word before, about any of us. And he said everyone knew what Dalish girls were like, and it could be any man's babe."

"He's an idiot shem," Branwen said fiercely, and wrapped her arms around Fioled. "He's a fool, and he never deserved you."

"I was the fool," Fioled said, and burst into tears.

Branwen let Fi cry into her shoulder, smoothing back her hair, while anger twisted into a knot inside her. "I hope his hair comes out in chunks. I hope he falls off the city gate into a midden," she said. "I hope his twig and berries rot and fall off."

Fioled's sobs broke off into a choked-sounding giggle. She hugged Branwen back.

#

It was a hard birth, with so large a child, but Fioled survived, pale and shaking. Her son, to Branwen's relief, had eyes and hair like his mother's, so she didn't have to look at that shem's blond hair on her little boy for the rest of her life.

She was quieter, after that. She kept at her work and raised her boy with the other children. Other Keepers might have told her to go, for bearing a half-shem child, but Fioled's mother and Branwen's mother both talked to the Keeper, and besides, Fi had nowhere to go. Her son took after her; he was a little bigger than the other young ones, but he was still one of their own.

Fioled did see, in time, the way that Davi still looked at her, plus how he whittled little animals for her boy and brought her the spring's first flowers.

Standing up at their handfasting, when Fi's son was rising two years old, was one of the best days Branwen could remember.

#

"It's a long way," Fioled said, frowning, as Branwen packed her things for her journey to the Conclave.

"It is," Branwen agreed. Haven was very far indeed from their clan's usual haunts. She'd have to catch rides where she could and navigate her way, joining up with the pilgrims and the others traveling to the humans' holy mountain. She'd have to pass herself off as an Andrastian, but so be it. Shemlen were only too happy to think an elf thought as they did.

She cinched up her bag and turned to embrace Fioled, who clung to her more tightly than her usual wont. "Be careful," she said, softly. "All those shemlen around—you know you can't trust them, Bran."

Branwen smiled, wry and sad. Fioled never went into shemlen towns these days unless she had to. "I know," she said. "I won't, and I'll be careful."


End file.
